Will VR/AR reduce the amount of electronic waste and energy in the world or will it just make things worse?
You’d need to take that in segment by segment looking at use cases and alternative approaches physical vs digital.
Take one example put it in perspective though: these days somehow now all seem to think that talking to people far away or taking meetings, requires all being on our own customer TV show/video stream. But a video-based conference conference call consumes 100x the bandwidth and I think like like 75% as much energy consumption, as voice-based conference call. On the human levelvideo calls can be helpful in providing cues to improve mutual understanding - but the studies show that they very quickly lead to stimulators overload, and this reduces overall efficiency of the person too. So it has to be in small doses and it cannot be hours of your workday……but that’s what many people are already being subjected to.
Some people now look it you weird if you dont want to do a meeting on video. But do we need to do ALL meetings on video just because we can?
I suspect this is the dynamic that poses the biggest risk: the. new tech just becoming a default way of doing things, regardless of whether we need it or not, and regardless of the waste involved.
I tried the thing out yesterday! Both utterly astounding and…absolutely not for me. But I could definitely see some later iteration of it being a really interesting music performance device. I am sure a lot of people with money are gonna try, anyway.
I guess when ‘new’ tech emerges people need time to adjust and figure it out.
Video calls also allows others to not travel as much to the office or further away taking a plane which might also reduce a lot of pollution. There are new laws being made to reduce our pollution as well. Although to be fair (and given by new climate models presented couple weeks ago) this clearly isn’t going fast enough. I really wonder what the outcome will be.
Things like environmental impact and social impact and psychological impact are really not down to people to figure out. They are systemic issues and only solvable by regulation-legal limitations. Which are basically absent. And very little likely to be imposed in future. So that sets up a dystopia ahead.
Where I assume they’re going: everything just being projected directly onto your retinas from a pair of otherwise conventional-looking eyeglasses. Having the screens and passthrough cameras and weird-looking fake eyeball display all seems to me stopgap tech for the thing they actually want
The screen on de front is a bit weird looking but I do think that for VR a screen on the front is a great feature, just currently not implemented well enough. My guess is that it will look a lot more ‘natural’ with future generations as AVP shrinks in size. Also I could imagine Apple releasing ‘cheaper’ versions in the future which do not include those things and keeping those extra’s for the pro model(s).
Just tried the AVP. Colleagues tried it last week and said it was good, but it exceeded my expectations.
The various spatial videos are outstanding! Truly.
Fidelity of the image is notably higher than other headsets I’ve tried, but not imperceptible from reality.
The UI is very intuitive and almost flawlessly accurate. I’m not sure I’d see myself using it window-based working.
I noticed the floating screens were not occluded by objects in my field of view. That might be by design or a limitation. If it is a limitation, then that raises potential issues for other AR use-cases where occlusion is essential.
Definitely on the heavy side wearing it.
Far too expensive for me, but I knew that already.
It will be interesting if there will ever be a version 2. My colleague thinks no.
No. Humans are analogue and we do not run with electricity or with electronic circuits. Hence, efficiencies from the digital domain will always be (and at best) an extension of us. Moreover, the existing population are used to physical movement, expression and interaction in the real world, i.e. to convert the population to move with equal finesse and ease is not going to work. Maybe from ground zero, where the babies are “affixed” with a VR headset and stays there for life but that would be disastrous and the consequences are unimaginably terrible.
In short bah, what is Apple Pro - just another money making device from Apple.
Apple is a giant company so of course they do it for the money and with all the borderline stupid marketing they can throw at it.
I personally do not care so much about the current generations and would much rather focus on the next generations who hopefully outgrown all our biases and aren’t stuck in nostalgia or base their future on science fiction movies and other conspiracies. But that’s just me I guess.
Funnily enough I was walking in the Lake District with a couple of my mates yesterday and the Apple VR headset was a topic of conversation for a while.
